William Rowan—Pioneer of Photoperiodism. 2. The Biography

I have enjoyed reading the late Marianne Gosztonyi Ainley’s (1937-2008) account of William Rowan’s life, from its beginning, in 1891 at Basel in Switzerland, as the son of a railway engineer from Northern Ireland and a Danish mother, to the end, in 1957, at home alone in Edmonton, Alberta.

Marianne Ainley covered all aspects of Rowan’s life in detail. Since there is available online what is essentially a précis of her 378 page book I will not repeat the basic information other than to say that Rowan had become obsessed with the idea of getting to western Canada while at Bedford School. He was inspired to travel, study, draw and photograph the wildlife, by visits to the school by Richard Kearton, showing his brother Cherry’s photographs of birds, and by Ernest Thompson Seton who talked about the large mammals of Canada and the USA. Rowan’s widowed mother held and the pursestrings and was eventually persuaded and she arranged for him to be a ranch pupil with a British family in Alberta. Thus Rowan was in Alberta for a first time in 1908, to the less than comfortable world of a ranch pupil but travelling first class on his mother’s insistence. He returned to Britain in 1910 where he crammed for matriculation to London university. He then returned to Canada, doing the odd job in Winnipeg while roaming and photographing the country and its wildlife. He was persuaded both by friends in Canada and family to take the place at University College London; he then had to find his own fare for the voyage.

The Dark-eyed Junco (Junco hyemalis) was one of two
species used in early experiments on varying daylength*

Thus began Rowan’s the zoological career but in describing it Ainley left a number of unanswered questions while missing clues that could have led to explanations of events. Some of Ainley’s interpretations are amusingly wrong while others are completely out of touch with life, the university scene or science in the early years of the 20th century. On a general note I often find accounts written by historians of science to be unsatisfactory simple because those historians have not been steeped in the discipline or of how practitioners within that discipline lived and operated. Similarly, conventions of the time are often judged through the lens of the present. Thus it was not at all strange that Mrs Rowan was left at home to do the housework and look after the children. Nor was it, or is it, odd that Rowan in following his many interests neglected to give his wife and children his full attention. The response of most of my scientific acquaintances to that statement would be, ‘Yes…and?’

Rowan clearly enjoyed studying zoology and botany, particularly the field work involved, while failing intermediate physics twice. He also wrote popular articles and took photographs while a student. With the course uncompleted he, like many of his fellow students, enlisted in the 14th (Reserve)  County of London Battalion of  London Scottish Regiment, a month after the declaration of war with Germany. However, Private Rowan became ill during his first long leave, during which time he returned to the labs at UCL. He had bouts of illness throughout his life. His leave was extended and the army then discharged him as ‘no longer fit physically for war service’. He had served 1 year, 68 days when he returned to civilian life in November 1915. With the family fortunes, which were held mainly in French stocks and shares, declining because of the war, Rowan spent a year in pursuing energetically his interests in natural history, while worrying about getting a job such while considering lecturing and taxidermy as possibilities. In October 1916 he returned to UCL for his much delayed final year. He graduated in 1917 with Third Class Honours, six years after he had begun life as a student.

Although not commenting specifically on the class of his honours degree, Ainley argued that Rowan never really got the hang of doing exams and that Bedford School was more interested in producing sportsmen than learned gentlemen. While later in the century, a ‘third’ would have been a bar to further life in a university, this was clearly not the case at the time.

Rowan spent a over year teaching at Eastby and at Bedales, a public (i.e. for non-British readers, a non-state, fee-paying, private school) school in Hampshire. Then came the offer of several jobs and his acceptance of one of them, assistant in the Department of Zoology at UCL, in effect an assistant lectureship including responsibilities within the departmental museum. He had, however, through a contact, applied for a new post in the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. Keen to return again to Canada, its wild places and its wildlife, he amassed a great deal of support for his application from leading British zoologists:

[J.P>] Hill stressed Rowan's qualifications in zoology, his wide knowledge of ornithology, his artistic talent, his excellence as a lecturer, and his "driving power and considerable organising ability.” Oliver wrote about Rowan's resourcefulness as a naturalist and his knowledge of bird protection. Dr. P. Chalmers Mitchell, secretary of the Zoological Society of London, praised Rowan's aptitude for fieldwork and his capacity for executive work.

He was offered the post in Winnipeg and therefore had to resign from the UCL job before he had started.

A month before he left for Canada in October 1919, Rowan married Reta Guenever Mary Bush whom he had met while she was an art student at the Slade. From their arrival in Quebec, they made their way to Winnipeg. After a short time in Winnipeg, Rowan was recruited to the University of Alberta by Tory. The pay was better with a promise of a chair in the offing.

Rowan’s work on the importance of changing daylength as the trigger for migration was done on a shoestring and his ‘Restless Energy’, the title of Ainley’s biography, meant that had had lots of other activities in hand, often out in the wilds of western Canada, in addition to starting a department from scratch including gathering and preparing specimens and posters. He worked at home, in the lab (such as it was) and in the field for virtually every hour of every day. However, it is obvious that he seemed unable to prioritise, leaving his daylength experiment to a helper over a crucial period, for example.

His friends in UK to whom he complained about Tory’s animus, lack of funding and lack of appreciation of his work in Canada really could not understand why Rowan stayed in Alberta. Indeed after his death Julian Huxley stated that ‘Rowan was one of the best experimental zoologists of the 20th century. But why, with all his talents, did the fool have to bury himself in Alberta?”

The American Crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos) played
a major part in migration experiments in the wild** 

Given his association with Huxley it seems anomalous that he, at one stage in his life, was supporting Lamarckism and hoped that with his crow experiments in which birds were exposed to different daylengths ‘he may be able to adduce some evidence in support of the Lamarckian concept of evolution’.  Although, as Ainley remarked, belief in Lamarck was not unusual amongst confused zoologists of the 1920s, the year the newspapers reported this, 1931, is interesting and Ainley seems to have missed the significance. In 1931 Rowan was persuaded by his friends to apply for the chair of zoology at McGill. He assembled a body of supporters in Britain and the USA. Amongst them was Ernest MacBride, a previous professor of zoology in McGill and now at Imperial College in London. MacBride, as I have recounted here was both an ardent Lamarckian, denying the existence of genes or mutations, and extreme eugenicist. MacBride has been described as Lamarck’s last disciple on earth and it cannot have done Rowan any harm in MacBride’s eyes to be seen as a Lamarckist. However, whether or not Julian Huxley, one of those responsible for the great synthesis of genetics, development and morphology in Darwinian evolution, got to know of Rowan’s statements I do not know. Despite the enormous level of support, Tory managed to kill off any chance of Rowan getting the McGill chair. In Alberta he stayed.

With the level of support given by leading zoologists in Britain and his international reputation, I find it odd that Ainley made no mention of a missing accolade. William Rowan was not a Fellow of the Royal Society. Had he been proposed but not elected? Or had his putative proposers not been able to garner enough support for a proposal to be made?

One might have thought that once the active, local, torment of Tory had disappeared off the scene and that once he finally made it to full professor (1931) he would have had a relatively untroubled existence in Alberta, even if money remained in short supply for his research. However, as he got closer to retirement long-standings members of his own department—whom he had backed relentlessly for advancement and better pay—turned against him; a demonstration of ‘no good turn goes unpunished’.

Given the explosion of interest in the photoperiodic control of reproduction that followed in Rowan’s wake it is noticeable how poorly or insufficiently appreciated in their own countries were some of its most successful scientists, ‘Jock ‘Marshall is one example; Don Farner (1915-1988) another.

By the time of Rowans death in 1957, the world of photoperiodism had moved on to the role of day length in controlling the onset of reproduction, rather than migration, and to the burgeoning field of neuroendocrinology.  Rowan’s work was known about but no longer referred to. For example, in three long reviews of aspects of environmental control of reproduction in birds and the physiological mechanisms responsible for a symposium I organised in 1973, Rowan did not get a mention.

Despite my qualms, some of which I have pointed out, Marianne Ainley made a great contribution to our knowledge of William Rowan. She, herself, had a remarkable life history. Born Marika Veronika Gosztonyi in Budapest in 1937, she  escaped from the Russian tanks advancing to put down the revolution of 1956 by walking along the railway line into Austria. From there she was able to reach an uncle in Sweden. In 1958 she moved to Canada and worked as a technician and research assistant having studied chemistry in Budapest for four years. A keen birdwatcher, she changed tack completely and became a research assistant in the history of science. In that field she obtained an MSc and then a PhD at McGill on the history of ornithology and avian biology in Canada. She was then at Concordia University and finally, as a full professor at the University of Northern British Columbia. She retired in 2002 and died of cancer in 2008.

I leave William Rowan in the words with which Marianne Ainley introduced Restless Energy:

WILLIAM ROWAN has been considered a Renaissance man, a man of integrity, a famous biologist, a flamboyant showman, a challenging teacher, and often a nuisance. His work as a scientist has been highly regarded by biologists all over the world, and his experiments have been covered in numerous zoology textbooks. Who was this scientist? What was he like as a person, a family man, a colleague, a friend? Why was he so well known to contemporary scientists, and why do we still find written references to his scientific work while, apart from anecdotal descriptions about his escapades in the field, little is known about the details of his life?

Convinced that William Rowan was an important subject for a biography, I went to Edmonton in July 1985 to see the environment where he lived and worked; to talk to the people who knew him as friend, teacher, and colleague, and who admired him as a world-renowned scientist, highly respected wildlife artist, and outstanding conservationist. Inevitably, other facets of his character came to light: his integrity, his kindness, his egotism, his unfailing need to criticize mediocrity, his ability to inspire others, his love of beauty and of nature. I learned of his exquisitely designed conservation stamps, Christmas cards, and hand-painted menus; of his great skill as a self-taught sculptor and musician, and as a builder of model sailing boats and a unique single-gauge model railway. I found that he had been well known as a radio personality, and as the man who tried to make crows fly the wrong way. Nearly thirty years after his death, William Rowan was still very much alive in Edmonton, and even those who had never set eyes on him could tell a few choice stories about his escapades. Indeed, as I gradually discovered, Rowan was an unusual individual — a Renaissance man in Alberta.

*https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dark-eyed_Junco,_Washington_State_02.jpg

** CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2310490

Ainley MG. 1988. Rowan vs Tory: Conflicting views of scientific research in Canada, 1920-1935. Scientia Canadensis: Canadian Journal of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine 1, 3-21.

Ainley MG. 1993. Restless Energy. A Biography of William Rowan 1891-1957. Montreal: Véhicule Press.

Houston CS. 2009. In Memoriam: Marianne G Ainley, 1937-2008. The Auk 126, 699.

 

William Rowan—Pioneer of Photoperiodism. 1. His persecutor

 It must have been during a lecture at Sheffield that I first heard of William Rowan—the man who established the importance of change in day length in controlling reproduction and migration in animals. From that work in the early decades of the 20th century the science of photoperiodism grew, particularly in birds, the organisms Rowan had worked on. I also learnt that day that Rowan had succeeded under the most difficult of circumstances and that he had been badly treated in Canada where he worked.

Sixty-odd years on I have now read a biography of Rowan published in 1993.

The culprit who treated Rowan badly, even persisting with that animus when Rowan had achieved international fame for his research, was the founding president of the University of Alberta, Henry Marshall Tory (1864-1947), who took it on himself as a mathematician to decree the nature of proper zoological research as wholly laboratory based. He forbade fieldwork—an order Rowan ignored by working in his own time. Tory had been desperate to recruit somebody who could teach biology in 1919. A new medical building and an intake swelled by veterans of the First World War needed a zoology department since just as in Britain at the time, many medical students were unable to study biology at school and an elementary foundation, i.e. remedial, course mirrored that throughout the medical schools of the British Empire.

Henry Marshall Tory

Rowan’s biographer, the late Marianne Gosztonyi Ainley (1937-2008) skewers Tory’s reputation as an academic and research funding organiser and administrator, not only for his personal treatment of Rowan but also his short-sighted motives, his later leadership of what became the National Research Council of Canada and his disdain for the biology.

Born in Nova Scotia, Tory was a graduate of McGill University in maths and physics having begun his course at the age of 22. His mother was intent on her son becoming a Methodist minister and he then obtained a degree in theology, and spent two years in the church. In 1893 he jumped ship and became a lecturer in maths at McGill. To assist the setting up of a new physics department, Tory was sent to Cambridge for two terms to learn how things were done by the big boys. He thus became involved with two departments and worked his way up the academic ladder and doing administrative jobs for the university in setting up outstations, in British Columbia, for example, that in turn, became independent institutions.

In 1905, the new province of Alberta was formed and decided it needed its own university. The various accounts I have read state that Tory was appointed President in 1907. I found this rather odd since most universities in the Empire would have had either a Vice-Chancellor or Principal, following English or Scottish usage, respectively, for its chief executive position. McGill until recently had a Principal á la Glasgow and Edinburgh, before succumbing to the American and inaccurate usage of ‘President’ for the post.

There is no doubt that Tory was successful in building a new university from scratch. From his initial appointment of five academic staff in 1908 and admitting 32 students, Tory left in 1928 a university with five faculties, in modern buildings with 1,600 students.

Tory clearly regretted his appointment of Rowan almost as soon as he had made it. Indeed he went so far as to write to University College London to enquire if his degree was real, despite the fact that Rowan had continued to an MSc. The fact that Rowan did field work was anathema to Tory, which I suggest says more about Tory than it does Rowan who was equally at home with all aspects, approaches and techniques of zoology of the time.

Even when Tory had moved on to manage Canadian research funding  he continued to prevent Rowan from getting grants even though he had already obtained funding from American foundations and the Royal Society in London and his research was strongly supported by leading British zoologists of the time, Julian Huxley and James Peter Hill FRS (1873-1954) of UCL being two of them. Marianne Ainley wrote:

…Rowan submitted a major application to the NRC, but applied nowhere else. This was an error that he soon came to regret. After a decade of teaching and working under adverse conditions, Rowan must have realized that in Canada money for all but practical research was always scarce. He may not have known, however, that this was because Canadian science had been “guided by an entrepreneurial scientific ideology,” brought to this country by the original Scottish settlers.“ In the late 1920s, this “entrepreneurial ideology” still influenced the funding of Canadian science. Rowan often mentioned the lack of government money for basic biological research in his correspondence with Taverner, but, in his enthusiasm and naivety, Rowan paid no heed to the well-known fact that all the scientific departments of the federal government (the Geological Survey, Experimental Farms, and the Biological Board) had been established with practical aims in mind. In Canada, utilitarian science was supreme, and the NRC was no exception.

In early I930, Rowan joined the ranks of'Canadian scientists who continued to encounter discouragements and difficulties and even indifference to pure research. Tory’s presidency of the NRC further exacerbated the already difficult situation many scientists faced across the country, Tory was renowned as a vocal advocate of applied research, a firm believer in the usefulness of science. He was later described as a man “tended to favour the practical short-term problems that would make a noise; among the long-term projects, he favoured those with a staggering pay-off, preferably in tens of millions of dollars.” Tory’s attitude towards science exemplified the prevailing Canadian one. Unfortunately for Rowan, Tory was in a powerful position where he could prevent the funding of basic research and promote the projects of his choice, mostly those that involved applied research. A careful perusal of the list of projects funded by the NRC from I920 to 1935 shows, however, that some basic research was funded, particularly in Tory’s area, the physical sciences.

Tory also denigrated Rowan personally at this time even though it was Rowan who was putting Canada in general and the University of Alberta in particular on the map for world-famous and highly respected biological research. Ainley unearthed a letter written by Tory in 1932 and continued:

“During the last two or three years I was in Alberta I gave very little attention to Rowan due to the fact that only elementary work was done in the department” In fact, Tory’s last years in Edmonton (1925 to 1928) coincided with those of Rowan’s most intense research activity. And while Rowan carried out his early experiments during his spare time in his own backyard, nothing could long remain a secret in a small, closed, university community. Ironically, it was during this period that Rowan’s research on the effect of daylight on the reproductive organs of birds put the University of Alberta on the scientific world map. From Tory’s letter it is evident, however, that he continued to consider only laboratory work as real science, and chose to disregard Rowan’s pioneering investigations and subsequent fame. By ignoring Rowan’s ornithological research and the enthusiastic recognition given it by members of the larger scientific community, Tory could maintain that “only elementary work was done” in the university’s zoology department. For Tory, Rowan “had reached his limit” as both teacher and researcher. By taking this attitude,

Tory could with a clear conscience prevent Rowan from being funded by the NRC, and later destroy the younger.man’s chances for academic advancement.

But Tory did not finish there. He damned Rowan’s chances of getting the vacant chair of zoology at McGill. Despite glowing references from his supporters in London, Edinburgh and the USA, those responsible for the important took more notice of Tory who had been asked to provide an opinion. Ainley again:

…Tory replied: "With regard to Rowan, I find it a little difficult to write about him because I am afraid that what I have to say will not be of any great help to him in securing an appointment at McGill." Tory wrote, Rowan "got a B.Sc. from the University of London... on a semi-war basis," and informed Currie that he, Tory, had not been impressed with Rowan as a scientist, because Rowan "would not stick to the laboratory." Tory recalled he had told Rowan that "his only hope of becoming a competent zoologist and of proving his right to the headship of the department... would be by taking up some special line of work and sticking to it until he had proved his position as zoologist." Tory added, "Unless Rowan has completely changed since I knew him I would not consider him at all capable of ever organizing such a department or of drawing to it men who would be zealous for work.”

By contrast, Julian Huxley thought Rowan ‘a rare combination of fieldworker, systematist, general zoologist and experimentalist” who would make an excellent head of department.

I would argue that Ainley hit the elongated metal fastening on the cranium when she concluded that Tory was a product of the Scottish tradition. Here, I suggest, Ainley missed a trick. I suspect there were other influences at play. Tory clearly saw physics as superior in every way, as physicists so long have done, to the other pursuits that seek to explain and to exploit knowledge of the natural world. In McGill with Tory in the physics department was no other than Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937; later Lord Rutherford). It was Rutherford who is alleged to have said ‘all science is either physics or stamp collecting’. While there have been attempts to argue that Rutherford did not mean it quite like that, there is no doubt that if reflected a common view from the Age of Physics.

My view of Tory is perhaps summed by a line in Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Gondoliers, first performed in 1889.  The King of Barataria had become a  ‘Wesleyan Methodist of the most bigoted and persecuting type’.

With the tune of the Grand Inquisitor firmly fixed as an earworm, I will leave Tory and return to William Rowan himself and his biography by Marianne Gosztonyi Ainley to another article. But I least I know now how he was badly treated. 

Ainley MG. 1988. Rowan vs Tory: Conflicting views of scientific research in Canada, 1920-1935. Scientia Canadensis: Canadian Journal of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine 1, 3-21.

Ainley MG. 1993. Restless Energy. A Biography of William Rowan 1891-1957. Montreal: Véhicule Press.

ANIMAL LIFE Magazine. A British publication from the early 1960s

 

In Britain in the early 1960s two magazines about animals appeared from different publishers within two months. The second of these was ANIMALS with the first issue in January 1963. I covered that in my article here. The first to appear was ANIMAL LIFE in September 1962 as a monthly. It was published by City Magazines.

A problem with searching for information on or copies of a magazine called Animal Life is that there have been a number of magazines published over the years in Britain, the USA and elsewhere with that name. For example I have found one published in the early 1950s at least by St Francis Publishing Company in London. The current magazine of the RSPCA is also called Animal Life. Also adding to the confusion is Purnell’s Encyclopedia Of Animal Life Magazine sold between 1968 and 1970 in weekly parts. In the USA, an Animal Life began publication in December 1953.

We know that ANIMAL LIFE was first published in September 1962 but I have been unable to find any information on when publication ended. The latest issue I have found is No 43 of March 1966. Were there any more? There is erroneous information out there on the length of the magazine’s run. Booksellers I have found are often the source of incorrect information; one claims to be selling a complete run of the magazine with the final issue was in April 1964. The British Library shows the start date as 1962 but provides no end date for its holding. My guess is that production ended some time in 1966. It had clearly gone by 1968 because the Purnell weekly parts publication would surely not have risked confusion with a magazine on the market with the same title.

Although ANIMAL LIFE was a British magazine it clearly, to judge by the letters and queries, had wide international sales in the English-speaking world, USA, Canada, Australia, South Africa, for example.

City Magazines was founded in 1955 and seems to be remembered as a publisher of comics, adult, like Blighty, as well as children’s. I have found no information on its ownership and publication of ANIMAL LIFE.

The size, style and content of ANIMAL LIFE show great similarities with the 1936-41 magazine, a joint venture of Odhams Press and the Zoological Society of London, called variously over its short life, Zoo, Zoo and Animal Magazine and, finally, Animal and Zoo Magazine.

Throughout and particularly in the early issues many of the articles were by French authors, suggesting the publisher had some arrangement with a magazine publisher in France. British and other others  had few but then an increasing number of articles in each issue. Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald (1900-1981), a well-known author on country matters, arrived on the scene in March 1963 to answer queries and correspondence from readers; he had an article in the magazine a few months earlier. There is no indication that I have been able to find on who edited the magazine.

City Magazines recruited four patrons, all well-known in Britain, particularly to television viewers, at the time:

Aubrey Buxton (later Baron Buxton of Alsa, 1918 –2009), a director of Anglia television and founder of the television series Survival which more than made the BBC run for its money.

Bernhard Grzimek (1909 –1987) was director of Frankfurt Zoo and well-known for his work with his son, Michael, in the Serengeti and the film Serengeti Shall Not Die of 1959. His son was killed in a plane he was flying in the same year.

Guy Mountfort (1905-2003) was a well-known amateur ornithologist, author (A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe) and conservationist. We was one of the founders of the World Wildlife Fund in 1961.

Reginald Greed (1906-1974) was director of Bristol Zoo.

The Patrons provided articles from time to time.

Some of the articles have historical interest and I will touch on a few in further articles, including a latter I remembered having written but had never seen in print. Zoo historians can find useful snippets of information there—and the advertisements are worth a look. The new Ford Consul Classic 1½ litre for £722.17.9d tax paid.

Buying both ANIMALS (then weekly) and ANIMAL LIFE  (monthly) was not cheap: at today’s prices  nearly £13 per month.

Does anybody have more information on ANIMAL LIFE magazine, particularly anything after March 1966?

UPDATED 17 October 2024

Two Wandering Hedgehogs

‘There’s a hedgehog by the road’. ‘Just opposite the house’. They were the shouts from the bedroom immediately before we all went to see what was going on. There—in the middle of the day—was a young but well-grown hedgehog, these days called the West European Hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus). I kept enough hedgehogs in the 1950s and early 60s to know that a hedgehog out by day is in trouble. There was a great deal of local building and road works during that week and we suspect their shelter had been disturbed. It was in a dangerous position by a road and with only an open small school field and a busy road in the other direction. The house’s chief animal wrangler—not me—donned her gloves and soon had the beast in a container. Hedgehogs if disturbed by day are hungry and so it was offered the few earthworms to be found but a profusion of large slugs from the garden. These it attacked with a great deal of slurping, wiping off slime and chewing with enthusiasm. We are fortunate in having a belt of woodland behind the house, well inhabited by hedgehogs, including in all probability the parents of this one. We released it with even more slugs which again it devoured before trundling off into the undergrowth. No sooner had we done that than another one was spotted in the same spot as the first. It too received a quick meal of slugs and was sent on its way.

With hedgehogs having declined in the UK it was a delight to see that we still have a breeding population. We have picked on a trail camera by night but not in the numbers we had around 20 or 30 years ago. They are relatively long lived and it does take a while for a relict population to die out if breeding ceases.

What surprised us was the lack of external parasites. When we or the long-gone dog encountered hedgehogs decades ago they were crawling with fleas and often had a number of ticks. Four-year old grand-daughter visiting from Hong Kong was thus able to see and stroke a hedgehog for the first time. Which reminds me. I must put the trail camera out to see if we pick them up.

Under the school fence is not a good place for a Hedgehog to be in the middle
of the day

Off into the woods

Salt Glands Revisited. The tragic story of an early salt-gland researcher and his family

Fifty years ago the late Jim Linzell and I were writing our monograph, Salt Glands in Birds and Reptiles, for the Physiological Society's Monograph Series; it was published in May 1975. In this series I revisit some of the topics and people who followed up the discovery of salt glands in birds by Knut Schmidt-Nielsen.

——————————-

Larry Zane McFarland
from Find a Grave

As well as Hubert and Mable Frings and the albatrosses of Midway (here) others followed up the discovery of salt glands by seeing which other species had them and how they worked. One was Larry Zane McFarland of the Department of Veterinary Anatomy at the University of California at Davis. He had a series of short notes in Nature in the late 1950s and 1960s (when that journal published letters of wide-ranging and topical interest). Amongst them was one which confirmed and extended the finding in albatrosses that ‘excitement’ induced or enhanced secretion. He worked on gulls and when producing secretion in response to a salt load found that light or sound increased the rate. The rapidity of response to shining a light at the birds or playing ‘individual notes, chords or a melody’ suggests the involvement of higher centres in the brain modulating the secretory reflex. McFarland described the musical instrument he played to the birds as a ‘quittar’, an old English word still used apparently and particularly in the USA for ‘guitar’.

In 1964 McFarland also introduced use of the ‘minimal stimulatory load’, the quantity of salt that needs to be introduced into the blood circulation in order to turn the salt glands on. That enable me to investigate the short-term and medium-term stimulatory and inhibitory effects of hormones and drugs on salt-gland secretion. 

Only after publication of our Salt Glands in Birds and Reptiles did I hear what had happened. I was at a conference in the USA, talking to someone who had worked at the vet school at Davis. I casually mentioned that McFarland, whom I had been quoting in the book, worked there. I was taken aback by the response that he was a dreadful man who had killed his wife and family, and then himself. And that is all I knew until a couple of weeks ago.

from Peaker & Linzell 1975

Larry Zane McFarland was born on 16 December 1930 in Des Moines, Iowa. There he attended Roosevelt High School. Before the veterinary course at Davis he was a student at Berkeley. He was known as a very hard worker. To fund his studies he worked a 40-hour week on night shifts.

He was awarded the DVM degree in 1956 and a PhD in 1960. At Davis he worked his way up to become chairman of the veterinary anatomy department, where he was remembered as an excellent teacher, in addition to doing research on a variety of subjects.

Hard working as he was, a colleague noted: ‘He used to preach to us that he did not expect us to devote too much extra time at the university, that it should go to our families. His devotion to his family was complete and total’.

McFarland had bought a large house with land in Davis. And it was there on 8 April 1972, that firemen found the bodies of McFarland, his wife Sonia, and their three children, Michael (14), Kenneth (10) and Nina (9), in the burning building. The two boys and McFarland had been shot while Sonia and Nina had been bludgeoned to death. A note was found in his vehicle containing the statement, ‘I am taking the life of myself and my family in the belief that a family should remain together in life or in death”.

The proximate cause of his behaviour that night seems to have been a phone call from his wife earlier in the day (7 April). Unbeknownst to most of his colleagues Larry and Sonia had become estranged, with Larry having lived in a nearby apartment for several months. 

Although a colleague in the department described McFarland as outgoing in personality he said that McFarland, like his colleagues, ‘led a "lonely existence" because of a "peer contact-peer judgment system of promotion" on university campuses. This "lonely existence" prevented any of his associates from detecting that something was going wrong. He said the problems McFarland was experiencing may have been deliberately kept secret as "a factor of his life which might have affected our opinion of him and influenced our decisions regarding his possible advancement”. The work situation common to many campuses, he said, "prohibits human exchange of human concern of one man for another”’.

The physical ramifications of McFarland’s actions that night, were evident in Davis for decades. The house McFarland had bought was the 15-room Chiles Mansion, built in 1902, which also had a large barn and other outbuildings on five acres. The house was gutted by the fire which McFarland had started with petrol in four or five places.

After a legal battle, Sonia’s mother gained the right to go against Larry’s wishes for the family to be buried together and she also gained possession of the property. The remains of the house were left untouched until McFarland’s mother-in-law died in 2006, aged 98. The barn was used a livery stable and tales can be found on the internet of the place being haunted, with horse owners reporting mysterious movements of the animals and the sighting of ephemeral white figures. The estate was sold to developers for $4.2M in the late 2000s and is now the site of 90-odd new houses on ‘Chiles Ranch’.

Thus behind the bland list of references, McFarland (1964) etc, at the end our of book, and in other papers, there is nothing that prepares anybody for the utter horror of McFarland’s actions in April 1972. All we can do is remember that Michael would now have been 66, Kenneth 62, and Nina 61.

The Argus, Fremont, California

Grey-headed Kingfisher: a colour plate from 1960

In the days when colour printing was extremely expensive, the Avicultural Society had special appeals for funds to support the appearance in Avicultural Magazine of the occasional colour plate. A well-known bird artist was then commissioned. Although the whole run of the Society’s magazines can be found online, the plates rarely see the light of day. Therefore I decided to show one, now and again, on this site. This is the 20th in the series.

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The artist for this plate was Chloe Elizabeth Talbot Kelly (born 1927) who went on to illustrate a number of field guides. Her paintings of birds appear in art sales. She began painting in 1945 at the Natural History Museum in London.

The article accompanying the plate was written by Alan Reece Longhurst (1925-2023). He was a well-known oceanographer and expert on plankton communities who spent a short time working in fisheries in New Zealand. He was born in Plymouth and after four years in the army he returned to London and university life. He graduated in entomology and then proceeded to a PhD on the ecology of notostracans. Fisheries research in West Africa then followed (with the short period in New Zealand in the middle). Spells in Plymouth and the USA were followed by a career in Canada. He became Director-General of the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Nova Scotia.

The Grey-headed Kingfisher (Halcyon leucocephala) is widely distributed in Africa. Like many kingfishers it does not live up to its name. It is terrestrial, never diving for aquatic prey, feeding on Insects, other invertebrates, mice; lizards, frogs etc.. It does dive into water but only to bathe. 

Avicultural Magazine 66, 1960

Salt Glands Revisited. Hubert and Mable Frings in 1958: The Salt Glands of the Albatross

Fifty years ago the late Jim Linzell and I were writing our monograph, Salt Glands in Birds and Reptiles, for the Physiological Society; it was published in May 1975. In this series I revisit some of the topics and people who followed up the discovery of salt glands in birds by Knut Schmidt-Nielsen.

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Knowledge of how birds survive at sea can be divided into two eras: Pre-1957 and Post-1957. It was in 1957 that Knut Schmidt-Nielsen (1915-2007), along with his colleagues, Carl Christian Barker Jörgensen and Humio Osaki, who were visiting scientists at Duke University in North Carolina, discovered salt glands. These organs secrete salt at very high concentrations allowing marine birds to get rid of excess salt which they may ingest by drinking seawater and/or by eating invertebrates like squid which contain much more salt than fish.

The kidneys of birds and reptiles, in contrast to those of mammals, simply cannot produce urine with a high salt concentration. Therefore the discovery of an extrarenal route of salt excretion from glands in the head and emptying into the nostrils explained why marine birds could drink water and survive on salt-rich prey containing. Until then there had been no agreement, some observers claiming that not only could such birds drink seawater but also that, in captivity, seawater was essential for their survival.

Few zoos attempted to keep pelagic birds—those that remain far out at sea for months or years. But those that did came to the conclusion that they must be provided with saltwater or with salt added to their food, usually fish. In 1925 Glover Morrill Allen (1879-1942) then recently appointed to lecture in zoology at Harvard, wrote in his book, Birds and Their Attributes of 1925:

Most sea-birds are known to drink salt water in preference to fresh; indeed captive gulls may die without it.

That is why, my previous post on the keeping and failing to keep Waved Albatrosses at Brookfield Zoo, Chicago, in 1935, is interesting. They were fed by hand on freshwater fish dipped into salty water.

However, the work of Schmidt-Nielsen and his colleagues threw no light on why pelagic birds would need salt water in order to live. In all species of birds, including domestic ducks and geese, tested thus far, the salt glands only turn on in response to the ingestion of salt water sufficient to raise the osmolarity of the blood. No salt water: no secretion. Thus pelagic birds should be fine living on fresh water. It was only several months after the full paper by Schmidt-Nielsen and his colleagues was published that this apparent anomaly came to light.

Schmidt-Nielsen’s discovery had actually started in the late 1930s but the war and his move to the USA had delayed his following up his earlier, inconclusive, experiments in Norway. The discovery was followed up by reports from those who had realised they had seen salt gland secretion in actioon, drops of fluid appearing on the end of beaks for example, without appreciating the significance. Others with access to marine birds, followed suit to demonstrate the presence of salt glands in other species. 

In January 1958, Hubert and Mable Frings of the Department of Zoology and Entomology at Penn State University were on Midway, that famous island in the Pacific. They worked on sound communication in insects (Hubert had started off as, primarily, an entomologist, and were trying to see if sound could be used in pest control, invertebrate and vertebrate. It would appear they were on Midway because of a contract they had or were about to get with the US Office of Naval Research. The US Navy was very concerned because aircraft and albatrosses have a habit of colliding. In a report of research done between 1959 and 1963, the scale of the problem can be seen:

At Midway Naval Station, 1,100 miles west-northwest of Honolulu, military aircraft collide with flying albatrosses at the rate of about 300 to 400 per year. One aircraft out of every five that hits an albatross on takeoff either aborts (stops before it is airborne), or dumps fuel and returns for appraisal of damage. About 70,000 pairs of Laysan albatrosses [Phoebastria immutabilis] and 7,000 pairs of blackfooted albatrosses [Phoebastria nigripes] nest at Midway in any given year. The population is declining.

The Frings knew of the then very recent discovery of salt glands and took the opportunity to look for any signs of salt glands in action:

The birds were, therefore, observed with this in mind, and it was noted that after fighting among the Black-foots, or occasionally during the ritual dancing, some of the birds showed drops of fluid at the tips of the beaks. Furthermore, during a local harassment campaign, many of the birds in the treated area were actively dripping. This suggested that the gland could be activated by “stress” or excitement.

There was a limit to what could be achieved on Midway and so the US Navy agreed to fly four birds of each of the two species to Pennsylvania. They arrived on 18 April and were housed initially in an old hen house on the university farm. The vicissitudes of getting the birds to swallow the offered food and unsatisfactory housing and water supplies were explained in a full paper in Condor, and here I will only describe some salient points. The Black-footed Albatrosses soon learnt to take food offered by hand. The Laysan did not and until it was found that a piece of fish, for example, could be slid into the beak nearer the mouth and would be swallowed, they declined. Two of the latter died but not of inanition but, it would seem, a lack of salt. Handling and disturbance was seen to result in secretion by the salt glands but the birds drank the fresh water provided. When the two remaining Laysans were declining badly, it was decided to give each an injection of salt. Recovery was remarkably rapid. Within ten minutes the birds were up and walking normally. The Fringses concluded that because salt-gland secretion can be induced by excitement or “stress” in these birds and because they had no opportunity to drink salt water, they became hyponatraemic. They seemed unable to distinguish fresh water from salt water.

These problems were overcome by providing salt in gelatine capsules embedded in the fish used to feed the birds. Later, an artificial  sea water pool was provided and the birds were seen drinking from it.

The remaining birds thrived and were moved by air, first in June  to the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory, Salisbury Cove, Maine, where they were given real sea water in tubs from which they drank. Then, on  20 August 1958, they were sent to the  National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C. ‘where Drs. Theodore Reed and Malcolm Davis are continuing with the methods described here’. I do not know what became of the birds after they reached Washington.

Thus Hubert & Mable Frings explained why some marine birds need salt water to drink when in captivity. In the wild any loss of salt evinced by the salt glands switching on seemingly inappropriately would easily be made up from squid in the diet or by drinking sea water.

I will return in a later article to the question of salt-gland secretion appearing or the rate being changed by internal or external stimuli caused other than by an increase in the tonicity of the blood plasma. I will do so with some trepidation since the story ends with a most horrific human tragedy.

The main reason for the birds being caught and flown to Pennsylvania was of course to investigate the salt-gland secretion. This was done while the albatrosses were still at Penn State. For this phase, Hubert Frings enlisted the collaboration of Adam Anthony from the physiology section of the Biology Department (1923-2012) and Martin Warren Schein (1925-1998) who had wide interests in animal behaviour and then in the Poultry Science Department. Their paper was published in Science. When stimulated by supplying salt capsules in the food, the secretion contained between 792 and 856 m-moles of sodium per litre. This concentration of sodium is twice that of sea water.

The concentration of salt-gland secretion compared with sea water is of course the key to understanding the role of the salt gland in marine birds. While it is convenient shorthand to describe the function of the glands as getting rid of excess salt, it would be of no use to the bird if the concentration did not exceed that of sea water. The whole mechanism is there because it enables birds to obtain osmotically-free water. As such it is a highly effective desalination plant that requires some of the highest rates of blood flow ever observed while its cells are stuffed with mitochondria to drive the energetically expensive transport systems across its cell membranes.

Although the rate of secretion was not measured the group assembled by Hubert Frings noted the secretion is discharged from the nasal glands through small openings below each tube-nostril. The fluid then flows along grooves on the beak to drip off the end. After being given a salt load, drops were seen falling at internals of 2-4 seconds.

A Northern Royal Albatross (Diomedea sanfordi) at the Royal Albatross Centre, Dunedin, New Zealand
I photographed this one through the glass of the hide in 2019. The small openings below the tube-nostrils
together with the grooves along the beak can be seen clearly.

But who were the Fringses who were in the right place and at the right time to embark on a study of the albatross salt gland?

Hubert William Frings was born in Philadelphia on 1 January 1914. His father, born in Germany, was a flooring contractor. Hubert graduated from what became Pennsylvania State University in 1936. He received a Master’s degree from the  University of Oklahoma in 1937, and a PhD from the University of Minnesota, in 1940. Teaching jobs, traceable to Iowa and Missouri, can be found in the records. He became an insect physiologist at the US Army’s Chemical Center in Maryland. He taught biology for a short time at Gustavus Adolphus College, Saint Peter, Minnesota in 1946-1947 but then returned to Penn State where he climbed the academic ladder until 1961. Then he went to the University of Hawaii until 1966. Hubert and Mable are commemorated there by an endowed scholarship. Finally, he joined the University of Oklahoma, becoming David Ross Boyd professor until his retirement in 1979.

Mable and Hubert Frings on their wedding
day, 9 June 1936
(from a family tree on ancestry.com)

Hubert married Mable Ruth Smith on 9 June 1936. Her family were farmers in Pennsylvania. She was born on 11 April 1912.

Hubert and Mable wrote two books: together: Animal Communication in 1964 and Concepts of Zoology in 1970.

As part of their support from the US Office of Naval Research, Hubert and Mable, together with their son Carl Frederick, published An Annotated Bibliography on North Pacific Albatrosses in 1966.

Mable died on 28 March 1998; Hubert on 8 September 2008, both in New Hampshire.

…Meanwhile on Midway the albatrosses are thriving with over 2 million birds nesting on 2.4 square miles of the atoll. The US Navy left in 1993 and flights to and from Henderson Field only occur at night during the nesting season.

Allen GM. 1925.  Birds and Their Attributes. Boston: Marshall Jones.

Frings H, Anthony A, Schein MW. 1958. Salt excretion by the nasal gland of Laysan and black-footed albatrosses. Science 128, 1572.

Frings H, Frings M. 1959. Observations on salt balance and behavior of Laysan and black-footed albatrosses in captivity. Condor 61, 305-14.

Peaker M, Linzell JL. 1975. Salt Glands in Birds and Reptiles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.